Saturday, January 19, 2013

Student Learning Objectives

The teachers in our school post learning objectives on the white board daily. Most teachers use dry erase markers to write the learning goals in student-friendly language. The following video is an excellent visual of how a teacher engages her students. She uses the term "SWBAT" for "students will be able to". This one minute video shows how students recite the targeted goal for each subject daily.

The first grade learning objectives
posted in the picture above include objectives for reading, language
and math. Ms. Dillon used colors to easily indicate subject areas.Dry erase sentence strips are my best friend. (wink wink) As you can tell, many of our teachers use them for their student learning objectives. The picture below is of a teacher who has objectives for many grade levels. Mrs. Berry teaches Title One reading and math to students from first through 5th grade. She has daily learning objectivesfor each grade displayed on the side of her filing cabinet.

Thesentence strips can be purchased at Really Good Stuff. They come in colored or white. This site even offers sentence strips that are magnetic.

The following learning targets are posted in my kindergarten classroom. My classroom is in a camping theme. I used s'mores to indicate different subject areas. I also have my students pretend to have an arrow and aim it at the target. I say, "Where do we aim?" Students say, "...at the target."

If you are interested in printing off a colored target for your learning target click here.The link will take you to a free Google Doc of the following learning target in a super hero theme. If you are able to use it in your classroom, please comment and tell me how you plan on using it. You can also click on the picture to download it for free.

Overview:1. State the objective in student-friendly language.2. Use dry erase sentence stripsto save time.3. Engage students in the objective by having students repeat or restate the goal.4. Create a visual for students using a target, colored sentence strips, or titles for subject areas.

12 comments:

Super cute Target! I usually just type my objectives up for the week. Since most of my littles are ELLs, we have to do a Content, and Language Objective as well as the Essential Question. That's why I am SO thankful usually they last a week. Ha! I like to have them echo read after I read them.

I teach kindergarten and "aiming for the target" sounds like a great way to get them to understand what our goals are. Love the dry erase sentence strips! Must get some of those! Thanks for the many great ideas.